Outlying

So, I haven't been taking the time to write well, but myself from past wrote me and said the blog should be updated twice a week, whether the post was ready or not. There was a reason for this at the time but I can't remember what it was. So there's no real writing today, just an outline:


Topic: Driving in the Rain

Possible titles: Slipping into 3rd, Hydro Racing, Wokking on Water (doesn't really fit this one, but it's such a good title I might need to write a post just to fit it)

True Message: Be careful when driving in the rain.

Humorous Theme: to Deliver Message: No one should get out of bed when it is raining.

Possible References: Noah's Ark, Leader of the Pack, Hurricane Katrina, Singing in the Rain, Mr. Limpet.

What? No Post? And so she died.

No post tonight. My cousin's wife just went into labor and I'm on brandy and cigar duty. Which I feel is not a real responsiblity as no one in the family drinks or smokes (although we do not yet know the baby's preference). But I wanted to be involved so I think they made up a job for me. I'm also bringing my hotplate so I can boil water in the waiting room. They still do that right?

No Continuum For Old Men

“Where we’re going we don’t need Rhodes” the famous line by Doc Brown that caused a whole island of Greeks and thousands of puffed up scholars to bow their heads in disappointment. Some maintain that the line should actually be written “Where we’re going we don’t need roads”. And they defend this interpretation with various lines pulled out of context and a whole myriad of conspiracy theories with which I will not bore you. What I think we can all agree on is that the Back to the Future movies set the advancement of time travel back decades.

The common portrayal of time travel in our media is all wrong. You can’t achieve it with electrical circuits, complex equations, and discontinued car models. Time travel is an organic process and is one of the most basic functions of the human body. It is a coping technique developed by our ancestors millennia ago. Fight, flight, or flux.

Think about one of the most tragic events of your life. Your body realized that your mind could not cope with all the emotion in that instant so it opened a portal in the space-time continuum and sent many layers of those emotions to your future selfs* to smooth the consumption of pain over time. This is why one event can make you feel sad for years and years after the event.

*Actually not “selves” here because I just decided that when talking about multiple instances of one’s own self the plural will be “selfs”.

It is a widely known (yet closely guarded) fact that most heart attacks are caused by a shock the mind or body experienced decades before. The body just sent too much of the original shock in one packet, so when the future self received it was overwhelmed. Because emotions have such little mass, they are easier to send into the future. Emails and blog posts also have small amounts of mass. I have some small mastery of time travel, so as a demonstration, while I wrote and posted this on Sunday evening per my goals, it will not display until Tuesday night.

One of the problems is that sometimes the emotion isn't the only thing that gets sent to the future. Sometimes memories get sent off too. So you might forget something until years later when the emotion hits. Once I forgot how to tie my left shoe. I went around for years with a shoe lace on my right foot and Velcro on my left until the day I remembered what it felt like when my dog died, and all of a sudden I remembered that the rabbit goes around the tree and through the hole, and from then on I could wear two big-boy shoes again.

Author's Note: That last paragraph is sort of funny, but doesn't really fit in with the theme of the piece.

Author: And you think an impromptu conversation between the author and his notes does?

Author's Note: I don't think so, but I think you'll put it in anyway. I think you do it everytime the content is about to get more personal than you want it to and you want a quick way to end the post.

Author: What do you know? You're just a note, you're not even a full post.

Author's Note: Hey man, words hurt. Especially if you are made of words. That would be like me throwing another person on top of you.

Author: I'm sorry man. You're great. You're a great note.

Author's Note: Would you say I'm really important?

Author: Yeah man, you're really important. I couldn't do this without you.

Author's Note: Would you say that I'm a "Key Note".

Author: See, that's why I love you.

Dream in the Afternoon

This is an excerpt from a dream I had after staying up all night reading short stories by Ernest Hemingway. It's not meant to be written in Hemingway's style, more in the style of one trying to recall a really depressing dream after a lot of really depressing stories.

The two men sipped their coffee or whiskey slowly as they watched the sun rise or set. They were either outside a cafe in Madrid or a hotel in Marrakesh. You know, some place that men stayed after the war. Men who were too changed to ever go back to the lives they led before. Men who wrote for the newspaper because writing was a masculine thing done by masculine men.

They were also raging alcoholics. They would have liked the idea of the AA meeting, but not the idea that no one drank at them. They liked the idea of men pouring out their feelings to other men, but only if they were both killing themselves with liquor.

They were each sleeping with the other one's wife. Somehow this was all the wives' fault. But maybe this wasn't an issue really because I think they were divorced. The waitress brought them some more of whatever it was they were drinking. They weren't really interested in her until they saw her wedding ring. She saw them noticing the ring and they all rolled their eyes. They all knew that now they would both fall in love with her and she would fall in love with both of them and there would be all kinds of sneaking around and probably someone ends up killing her husband. And in the end she just runs away and the men find themselves back at this table drinking again.

Oh yeah, and at some point they go out on a safari. So this is probably in Marrakesh. They also have automatic pistols, but they're never loaded until they start drinking heavily. Probably one ends up shooting the other one and we never really know if its an accident or not. The whole world is an accident really.

Also, at some point some tourists come through and everyone really looks down on these people because the tourists think that life is pretty good and they think they're happy and they're totally oblivious to what is going on around them. Newspaper men are totally going to sleep with their wives.

Commitment Issues

"Thanks" she said as I opened her car door. Was that surprise in her voice? Did people not open car doors anymore? Well, if that struck her as unusual this next part was going to leave her at a loss for words. I opened my car door for myself (see nothing unusual about me opening car doors), and I buckled my seat belt before handing her the pink ribbon pin.

"What's this for?" she asked, giving the surprised tone an encore performance.

"That's the pink ribbon, it's dedicated to raising breast cancer awareness and funding for breast cancer research."

"I know that, she said, but why are you giving me one?" She had given the surprised tone a break and was trying out an offended one.

"Our date tonight is one of their many sponsors."

"How can a date be a sponsor?" she asked, offense giving way to incredulity.

"All profits from this date will be donated to breast cancer research".

"We're going to dinner and a movie, how could we possibly make this profitable?" Having tried three separate tones already she mixed them all together for this question.

"Lots of ways, we could find stacks of cash under our chairs, get roped into a high stakes scavenger hunt, win an impromptu dance competition. The list goes on and on."

"Those don't seem very likely" she forecasted with little to no statistical background.

"Maybe not, but unlike other couples out this evening if we come into some money it goes to a good cause"

"What if dinner and a movie cost $50 dollars and you find $50 in the parking lot."

"Then the evenings a wash."

"And if you find nothing?"

"Then it's a $50 tax deduction"

"I don't think that's how that works." she advised, with no accounting or financial planning background. "We're not going to dinner or a movie tonight." Not even 15 minutes into our relationship and the unilateral decisions were already in play. "If we're going to be sponsors we're going to make some money".

"What did you have in mind?" I questioned in my customary monotone.

"I have an ex out of town with a fortune in baseball cards. We'll break in there, sell the cards downtown, and donate the money." She said this as if explaining the errands schedule, 'We'll go to the bank, then pick up milk, then drop by the redbox'. To emphasize the casual and final nature of this plan she rested her hand on top of mine.

As a connoisseur of absurdist humor I laughed, but my right arm which had been resting peacefully on the armrest and now played host to her left was confused as it was not usually a party to physical comedy.

As I prepared to turn left my right arm was abandoned as she grabbed the steering wheel and changed our course. "Right here" she said, "he lives on 7th street."

Either she was really committing to this joke, or I was going to have a pretty eventful post for tonight.

Slightly more subtle than Sunday

I fear that, as a country, we have forgotten what made America great. The leaders of the late 1980s, them men in law enforcement, those who pioneered technology and space travel, the pioneers of the west, and the native americans. And of course, the one individual who combines all of these into a single entity: BRAVESTARR.

The tales of Bravestarr were told to me when I was in preschool on Saturday mornings around 6 am from September 1987 through February 1988. Those historians among you will remember that Bravestarr was the lone law man on the planet of New Texas where he and his wise-cracking mechanical horse (who was a quadruped for purposes of travel and a biped with an energy rifle for purposes of self-defense) defended the good people of New Texas from Tex Hex and his band of bandits.

I do not remember all the tales of this hero, but I sure as shooting remember a talking horse who could stand up and shoot a gun. Those lessons never leave a young boy.

So I watch the political figures of today who should be familiar with these same tales of heroism and I am disappointed in their efforts (or lack thereof). This comes to mind as I seem to recall that significant portion of Bravestarr's energy was spent on protecting miners. You see, Tex Hex and other greedy fellows were always trying to take advantage of the hard-working miners. These miners did not have the skill set of Bravestarr (Eyes of the Hawk, Ears of the Wolf, Strength of the Bear, Speed of the Puma) as today's miners do not have the skill set of the modern politician (Degree of the Law, Capital of the Political, Attention of the Media, Speed of the Puma).

The histories (if we chose to read/watch them) teach us that miners are self-reliant and proud workers, but sometimes even the strongest need help when their greatest foe is the one who pays them and should ensure safe working conditions.

Yearning to Learn Free

Based on the two-year median household income in 2008, I don't make much more than half the households in America so I shouldn't feel much guiltier than the median amount of guilt when I think about the people in the country who are less fortunate than me. Except that the weekly publication to which I subscribe has several articles covering each continent (Antarctica is an exception) and are constantly detailing the poverty that pervades much of the world. And when you take their incomes into our median I jump up the percentile/guilt ladder quite a bit.

It is in the thralls of this guilt that I make a monthly donation to Doctors Without Borders (by the by, I have never gotten the monthly report they promised to send), and a religious organization (I won't mention it by name as I doubt they would like to be associated with these posts).

This proactive approach actually saves me money, because when the telemarketers call asking for my donations for a variety of causes I can explain to them that my charity budget has already been allocated for this fiscal year. When the commercials come on asking for a dollar a day to feed the world the waves of guilt crash against the unmovable walls of my steel-clad financial planning. If they really wanted my help, they would have arranged these commercials or phone calls to reach me back on May 25th 2009 when I was wrapping up the Fiscal-Year 2010 budget.

However, sometimes a little excess guilt creeps through and I take care of that by giving blood, or volunteering at the local thrift store which employs low-skill members of the workforce and use the profits for a variety of humanitarian efforts. In my most recent visit I got to stamp the prices on the donated books, and organize them on the shelves.

Now, I tell you all of that to tell you this: In the storage/work area in the back where we performed our repetitive tasks of sorting and stamping there is no stimulation besides the mindless tunes from a pop station on the radio. Perhaps I'm a snob, but in this environment where low skilled, poorly educated people are stuck for 8 hours a day it seems like anything educational or instructive you could broadcast would be better than the same 75 songs and 15 commercials cycled over and over again.

Play a language-learning program, audio recordings of Dickens, Twain, or Joyce; or some of the MIT open course lectures. They wouldn't have to write essays or explain the concept they were learning, but just to be exposed to something new, something to expand the vocabulary and familiarize you with history has got to be better than having the exact price of a new car stereo, or the latest deal on gutter cleaning drummed into your consciousness.

What have I become, my Swedish friend?

There are dozens of cooking shows on TV now. I don't watch any of them, but from their titles I'm led to understand that in some, chefs compete to make the best iron recipes, in others they travel down to hell and challenge Satan to cooking contests to win the freedom of their loved one's souls.

As of May 31, 2010 there will be no fewer than 2 cooking channels: Food Network and The Cooking Channel. And still, dozens of other food shows on other networks. Meanwhile, we are the fattest nation on Earth. Apparently our Marines weigh so much, Guam is about to capsize under their weight. And I can't have a normal conversation with someone without their eyes drifting down to my perfectly rounded, swelling mid-section. Pardon me reader, my eyes are up here.

But the fat may actually be our friend (you will never have a closer friend). Roger Unger of the University of Texas Southwestern at Dallas (thank Emeril for Texas and their defense of the fat)contends that getting fat is not what causes metabolic syndrome (a nice way of saying the bad stuff fat people deal with: high cholesterol, fatty liver, fatty-fat-fat nickname, a greater risk for diabetes, a lower-risk of romance, heart disease, falsely identified as Santa, and stroke). These symptoms may actually be caused by the lipids in the wonderful amounts of delicious food that we eat. To handle the lipids the body increases the adipose/fat cells to keep the toxic lipids out of our internal organs (also our pipe organs, and our Oregon states).

So next time you look at your fat, bulgy body in the mirror, look at the fat a little more kindly. It may be saving your life. And who knows, if you make it mad enough, it might just release all its lipids at once, and all the Rachel Rays (which is either a kind of gun or fish) in all the world won't be able to save you then.